The Secret to Submissions

Perhaps otherwise known as one of the most mundane, monotonous and/or miserable days of the week. To be quite honest, I’m actually a fan of Mondays and the start of the week, but I recognize that I probably stand alone on that one. Regardless, in the spirit of breaking out of the mundane and monotonous routine of the average Monday, I’ve decided to switch it up a bit for today. Instead of presenting our lovely readers with a “Meet the Staff Mondays” blog post, today’s post is all about letting y’all in on the secret to one of our most guarded treasures.

Submissions.

We love to get them. You love to send them. And as part of the PR team for the Circle, I absolutely love to encourage them. We’ve received a lot of great submissions from students all across the board this semester. Sure, we’ve got your classic poets that live, breathe and write masterpieces on a regular basis. But we’ve also got engineers and journalists and criminology majors and RTVF majors that have submitted equally brilliant works of art.

So here’s the question that we’ve all heard a million times and are bound to hear a million more times:

How do we choose?

Let me be the first to tell you, it’s not easy. More often than not, we want to print more than we can fit on the pages. Auburn is a talented campus, and it definitely shows through in our submissions. The first step in the process, however, is to strip the works from their authors (don’t worry, it’s not permanent!) As soon as a submission comes in, the name of the author is taken off of it, and it’s labeled with a number. From there, the anonymous copies are placed safely into the folders of each editor in the relevant section and reviewed. After individually reviewing each work, editors discuss the works in their section and rank the submissions according to guidelines set by each section at the beginning of the semester. After ranking the works, we work as many of them as possible by rank order into the magazine.

So there you have it! The secret to reviewing submissions, although not quite as exciting as drawing out of a hat, magically knowing which submissions should go in upon arrival or creating a hunger games esque arena for editors and their favorite submissions, is really just that. Not easy by any means, but also not as unpredictable and randomized at it may seem either.

The secret to our submission process isn’t all that you’re getting on this extraordinary Monday, though. If you’re one of Auburn’s artistic assets and you accidentally missed the deadline, we’re offering a last chance on submissions! Turn them in by Wednesday (Sept. 25) at 4:45 p.m., and we’ll take them through the (not so secret anymore) submission process.

Enjoy the rest of your day everyone! May your Monday be marvelous and lacking in monotony.